Fate closes door for Obama meeting with his personal hero Mandela

A man holds on June 27, 2013 posters of former South African President Nelson Mandela outside the Mediclinic Heart Hospital in Pretoria, where the ailing leader is hospitalised. US President Barack Obama June 29, 2013 met the family of his "inspiration" Nelson Mandela but was unable to visit the anti-apartheid legend who remains critically ill in hospital. AFP 

By MUGUMO MUNENE mmunene@ke.nationmedia.com, June 29  2013

In Summary

• The issue was forefront in the minds of the journalists travelling with him. Before boarding Air Force One in Senegal for South Africa, Mr Obama said: “I don’t need a photo op, and the last thing I want to do is to be in any way intrusive at a time when the family is concerned with Nelson Mandela’s condition.
• A global icon, Nobel peace prize laureate, moral beacon, first post-apartheid South African president, a man of great forbearing and fortitude, an orator, a lawyer, a man of the people, fondly called Madiba by South Africans or just tata (father) by his children and those who see him as a towering father, Mr Mandela is no ordinary mortal.
• He was also trying to connect to Malcom X, a Muslim preacher and peer of Dr King and who was pursuing the same cause in different ways, and who was also gunned down in 1965.

When US President Barack Obama disembarked from Air Force One onto South African soil on Friday, he must have been grappling with the one reality that has the whole world sitting on edge.

He was so near and yet so far from global icon Nelson Mandela, the man he has described as a personal hero; the one who inspired him to enter politics and who now lies in hospital in his ultimate great battle with mortality.

Understandably, world attention has been focussed on the health of South Africa’s first black president, and President Obama, the first black American president, may have arrived in the country of this legend days, perhaps even hours, too late.

No doubt Mr Obama would have liked during his presidency to visit Mr Mandela in South Africa when the anti-apartheid leader was still in a good health. He most likely had been hoping to at least spend a few minutes with him during this trip.

The issue was forefront in the minds of the journalists travelling with him. Before boarding Air Force One in Senegal for South Africa, Mr Obama said: “I don’t need a photo op, and the last thing I want to do is to be in any way intrusive at a time when the family is concerned with Nelson Mandela’s condition.

“I think the main message we’ll want to deliver, if not directly to him, but to his family, is simply profound gratitude for his leadership.”

The decision of whether he would even see him in hospital was left to the Mandela family, according to the White House.

Close bond

A letter that the Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory sent to Mr Obama after he won re-election in 2012 encouraged him to come to South Africa. Other correspondence reveals mutual respect and admiration, but little evidence of a close bond.

After all, the two men are bound by history as the first black presidents of two countries with very troubling racial histories. Both went beyond expectations to lead their nations that had long struggled under the weight of slavery, racial discrimination and apartheid to greater equality and amity across races.

In 2008, months before Mr Obama was elected, he sent a video birthday message to Mr Mandela in which he paid glowing tribute to the old man. He ended with: Happy birthday Mandela and I hope to see you soon.”

It would appear now that it is too late for the kind of meeting Obama envisaged in that video greeting five years ago. But it might well be on his mind when he returns for a second visit to Robben Island where Mr Mandela remained imprisoned for nearly three decades.

American media has reported that the two have had telephone conversations during the Obama presidency but no doubt, President Obama would have liked a warm handshake and a rich face-to-face conversation with a man who sacrificed 27 years of his life to the cause of a better South Africa and a more just society.

Richard Stengel, who co-wrote Mr Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom, spoke with MNSBC TV journalist and anchor Andrea Mitchell last Thursday.

Ms Mitchell offered: “You can imagine the role that Mandela played just in the imagination of a young Barack Obama and all of his generation.”

To which Mr Stengel responded: “And I think, you know, there are similarities between President Obama and Nelson Mandela, I think, in terms of their temperament, in terms of their approach to problems as pragmatists.”

A global icon, Nobel peace prize laureate, moral beacon, first post-apartheid South African president, a man of great forbearing and fortitude, an orator, a lawyer, a man of the people, fondly called Madiba by South Africans or just tata (father) by his children and those who see him as a towering father, Mr Mandela is no ordinary mortal.

His aura affected the young Barack Obama as it did millions, perhaps billions, around the world; the place of pride he occupies in Mr Obama’s heart is captured in his memoir Dreams from My Father.
Father’s shadow

Mr Obama writes that as a young man grappling with putting a more definite form to the shadow of his Kenyan and absent father, as a young mixed race man living in a country whose population was still majority white. He was raised by his white mother and his white grandparents at a time when America was beginning to cast off the shackles of racial discrimination.

Mr Obama’s longing for a connection with his father’s identity, and his admiration for black men who fought white supremacy in the 20th century, come clear: “It was into my father’s image, the black man, son of Africa, that I’d packed all the attributes I sought in myself, the attributes of Martin and Malcolm, Du Bois and Mandela.”

He was relating to the momentous battle against racism in the US by Martin Luther King Jnr in the 1950s and 1960s for which the African-American Baptist pastor paid with his life, silenced by an assassin’s bullet in 1968.

He was also trying to connect to Malcom X, a Muslim preacher and peer of Dr King and who was pursuing the same cause in different ways, and who was also gunned down in 1965.

In the book, Obama reveals his admiration for W.E.B. Du Bois, a civil rights activist, author, editor and first African-American to earn a doctorate from Harvard University and was a co-founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People in the US in 1909.

And to cap it off was Mr Mandela’s long and unwavering struggle against apartheid in South Africa. He was sent to prison by his white detractors for 27 long years.

The Mandela and Obama history shaped by 20th century race relations would ultimately concide when Mr Obama was asked to write a foreword to Mr Mandela’s Conversations with Myself published in 2010.

In the foreword, he writes reverently of Mandela, and it becomes clear that the anti-apartheid icon was a great inspiration to the young Obama even from another country in a lonely prison cell at Robben Island.

He writes that his first participation in political activity politics came when he joined a movement that was urging the US and UK to take investments out of South Africa to put pressure on the apartheid government to end colour bar policies.

Human progress

“His sacrifice was so great that it called upon people everywhere to do what they could on behalf of human progress,” Mr Obama wrote in the foreword. “In the most modest of ways, I was one of those people who tried to answer his call.”

He nonetheless acknowledges that his personal struggles could never compare to what the victims of apartheid had encountered.

“But his example helped awaken me to the wider world, and the obligation that we all have to stand up for what is right. Through his choices, Mandela made it clear that we did not have to accept the world as it is – that we could do our part to seek the world as it should be,” he writes.

President Obama was in South Africa in 2006, and it is often reported that the two men met then. But according to a report in the Los Angeles Times, the two never met in South Africa but had met briefly in Washington DC on May 17, 2005.

“Mandela, it turns out, was only vaguely aware of whose hand he was shaking, and he initially turned down the visit from the then new junior senator from Illinois. Obama had detoured to Mandela’s hotel from a meeting in Georgetown,” the newspaper wrote.

Back then, Obama was a fledgling politician, and no one knew what the future held for him. Mr Mandela was still an active global icon with a tight schedule, and it took quite some work for him to take time to meet Mr Obama.

South Africa and US had terrible histories of extreme, often debilitating forms of racial discrimination which is what makes both men stand out.

And yesterday, Mr Obama visited Soweto, the black township that became the epitome of the struggle against the colour bar and racial discrimination. Soweto was the centre of the struggle against the use of Afrikaans as a medium of instruction in schools for which scores of students paid with their lives at the hands of a crushing police response to their rallies in June 1976.

It is Soweto that carries one of the world’s most famous addresses – what is now called Mandela House – that sits at 8115 Orlando West in Soweto.

It was the Mandela family house he loved to call home until he donated it to the Mandela Foundation who converted it into a museum.

The fondness with which Mr Mandela held the house is captured in Long Walk to Freedom;

“That night I returned with Winnie to No 8115 in Orlando West. It was only then that I knew in my heart I had left prison. For me No 8115 was the centre point of my world, the place marked with an X in my mental geography,” Mandela wrote.

“The house was identical to hundreds of others built on postage-stamp-size plots on dirt roads. It had the same standard tin roof, same cement floor, a narrow kitchen, and a bucket toilet at the back.

Although there were street lamps outside we used paraffin lamps as the homes were not yet electrified. The bedroom was so small that a double bed took up almost the entire floor space. It was the opposite of grand, but it was my first true home of my own and I was mightily proud. A man is not a man until he has a house of his own.”